He didn’t come out to see me off, maybe because I hadn’t gotten his joke. The last I saw of him, he was standing at the window again, staring out at the dying light and the throbbing Pacific Ocean. Outside, I found the fog had come in to lie across the roads. I almost drove off the edge once, but I eventually got back to Highway 1, and soon was sliding through the misty evening hills, Dexter Gordon’s A Swingin’ Affair playing quietly on the stereo.
The more I thought of what Gustibus had said about Eligor and Anaita, the more I began to feel how hopeless it all was. As if being an angel wasn’t complicated enough, I had somehow managed to fall in with gods and monsters.
And seriously piss them off.
ten:
four arms, no waiting
I FULLY EXPECTED to find an eviction notice on my apartment door when I got home, or even a couple of police officers wanting to talk to me about guns being fired, but to my surprise I found neither.
I should have moved out right then, I guess. After being haunted, then getting my shit all beat up in my own living room, I sure didn’t feel quite the same cozy way about the Tierra Green apartment (in fact I’d never felt cozy about it to begin with) but I was under standing orders from Heaven not to move again. Plus, I was sick and tired of people (and non-people) just waltzing in and out whenever they wanted to. Instead of throwing all my stuff in the trunk of my car and heading for the nearest Econo Lodge like a sensible person, I stopped at a hardware store and got a chain to put on the door and a couple of window locks. At home I busted out my screwdriver and installed them all. I was doing it mostly to slow down my new friends from the Black Sun. The nastier things I come into contact with from time to time weren’t going to be kept away by chains or locks, but at least I’d hear them getting in.
When I was done and had eaten the last of Sam’s Chinese food order directly out of the fridge, I called George, aka Fatback. Javier, the old family retainer and pig-keeper, picked up the phone because at that time of the evening George was still a human with a pig brain wallowing naked in mud. (I never call George “Fatback” to his face, by the way. It’s not my nickname for him, but I didn’t know his real name until I actually met him, so it still slips out from time to time.) I asked Javier to let me ring through to his boss’s answering machine, then I updated my list of things I wanted George to find out.
After that I called Sam and left a message for him as well. It was strange, not automatically trusting Sam the way I used to, but even after all the secrecy and weirdness about his new allegiance, he was still my closest friend, and he’d risked getting shot at my side a few times recently when he hadn’t needed to. Also, I’d decided that whatever my personal reservations were, I really did need to see this Third Way place of his. If one of Anaita’s pet projects was trying to murder my soul, it probably behooved me to know a little more about her other hobbies.
Oh, and I stashed my sofa gun again. Not in the sofa this time, of course, in case the Black Sun Faction came back. Despite the locks I’d put in, I wasn’t that opposed to seeing them again. After all, I still owed Bald Thug a serious beating, and I’m not really a forgiving kind of guy.
• • •
I must have fallen asleep on the couch because that’s where I was when the noise at the window woke me up. It wasn’t anything ordinary like a branch scratching at the glass, or leaves being blown against it by a stiff breeze, but what was truly strange was that it didn’t really sound like anyone trying to break in, either. It was the same bumping I’d heard before, over and over but with no discernible rhythm, like your drunk cousin dancing at a family wedding. I got up but didn’t turn on any lights, and I took my automatic with me.
Whatever was outside the window, it wasn’t trying very hard: the awkward thumping barely made the glass shiver. Then, just as I had almost crawled close enough to see what it was, it stopped. I put my face close to the window, but I couldn’t see anything beyond it except the dim, shadowy outlines of buildings and the street.
My first impulse was simply to crawl back to the couch, because whatever it had been was probably a brain-damaged bird, and didn’t seem big enough to do any harm anyway. Also, I was back on the heavenly job clock—I could get a call any time. But things had been freaky enough lately to make me more careful than usual, so I got a flashlight out of the kitchen drawer and returned to the window for another look.
Whatever had bumped the window had left little smeary marks on the outside, like the track of a snail on his first acid trip, but the largest part of them were translucent blots, as if someone had pressed a small round thing like a ping pong ball, sticky with slime, over and over against the glass. I had no idea what it meant, and I didn’t like it.
Of course, true to the infamous Dollar Luck, as soon as I’d stretched myself out on the couch again and covered myself with my jacket (because who wanted to walk all the way across the apartment to the bed?) my phone rang.
It was Alice, dear sweet Alice, of the dulcet tones and liquid nitrogen blood. After she’d expressed disappointment at not waking me up, she told me I had a case in Spanishtown. It wasn’t a nice one either, some kind of domestic dispute that had ended in a killing.
Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, and it was off to work I went.
Unluckily for the victim (but luckily for me) my dead client was the brother-in-law of the shooter, a nice guy who had tried to interfere with the beating of his sister, the killer’s wife. The lucky-for-me part was that I didn’t have to plead the case of the killer, a guy who’d shoot his own brother-in-law so he could get on with smacking the shit out of his spouse. The brother-in-law had been a perfectly nice, hard-working guy named Mejia, a construction worker, and I had no trouble getting him accepted into the Big Happy, but he had real trouble going, still worried about his sister. I’d seen police cars at the residence when I got there and could tell him, without breaking any rules, that I was pretty sure his brother-in-law had already been arrested and was on his way to jail. This was enough to convince Mr. Mejia to step into the light.
As I came back through the Zipper into the blinking blue and red glare from the cop cars that were currently turning Macdonald Street into a carnival midway, my phone rang again.
“Bobby?”
“George!” I looked at the time out of habit. A bit after one in the morning. “So you got my message . . .”
“Look, uh, I just wanted to let you know that there’s some pretty weird stuff going on around here, Bobby. Weird stuff.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Noises. I thought it might be rats up in the attic of the barn, but they’re too damn big, Bobby. It’s been going on for a couple of days, but Javier sent his son up and there’s no droppings, nothing. And Javier said he’s seen some stuff around the property, too. Something pretty big, in the bushes, and something running under the main house, all hairy.”
So whoever they were, my enemies were watching Casa Fatback, too. I felt pretty guilty about that, since I was willing to bet it hadn’t started until I first asked him to check up on the Black Sun stuff.
“Yeah, that was when,” he confirmed. “That night. You think it’s those guys? But they’re just a bunch of Nazi punks!”
I didn’t want to tell him exactly what Gustibus had said about them also being murdering robbing arsonists—no point in worrying him more, because he already sounded pretty freaked out—so I said, “Yeah, well, you know I run in some strange circles. Have Javier hang out with you for the night. If it’s still happening tomorrow, I’ll come up and have a look around.” Not that I was going to accomplish much when I couldn’t even keep the whatever-they-were away from my own apartment.
My promise seemed to make George feel a little better. We were getting ready to hang up when I remembered something that had come to me while driving through Spanishtown, one of my favorite districts, and thinking idly about how the past shaped the present. Gustibus had said that in her goddess days, Anaita had been worshipped by the Persians. Maybe that was a starting point for some of the questions I needed to answer.